Reviews for XCOM 2: War of the Chosen

This DLC is a great expansion on an already great game. XCOM 2 was a great but flawed game. It took away 100 hours of my time and kept me engaged, but it did crash a fair bit and had many frame rate drops mid to late game. War of the chosen fixed the problems and added new features to keep it fresh. My only complaint is that the factions didn't really fight each other, it would be more interesting if you chose one to ally yourself with and one to be neutral to and one to be your enemy, adding more replay value. Otherwise it is a great expansion if you liked the original version of XCOM 2 and is worth the price.

100

Hope is not lost

lconanl

10.06.2017

Remember when games had *expansion packs*? I'm not talking DLC, I'm talking full-blown expansions which fundamentally alter and expand the original. War of the Chosen absolutely completes XCOM2, and it feels like a whole new experience for it. In a time where small DLC packs reign supreme, WOTC shows us that expansion packs still have their place.
The new classes are incredible fun to play with, the extra research and covert missions are enthralling, and I've never loathed enemies as much as I have the Chosen.
WOTC provides a slew of new options, threats, and performance tweaks. It is easily my favourite game of the year, and I recommend it to everybody who even remotely enjoyed the base game.

100

Amazing expansion to an Amazing Game

darkfalcon59925

09.30.2017

Xcom 2 was one of my favorite games of the year when it came out. Difficult yet fair, I played through it multiple times in quick succession, including a Youtube series. I loved it. War of the Chosen adds so much content to the base game, along with changing certain existing mechanics to fit with the new content, that it makes it a completely new experience. Adding a variety of new enemies, with both some old, more familiar mechanics, as well as a mess of new ones, the Aliens and Advent are more capable then ever. The AI seems to have been improved as well, with enemies more willing to move around to flank your soldiers, and overall making even the older enemies seem more threatening than ever. This is all balanced by giving Xcom a ton of new abilities, character classes, and weapons that empower the player and his team to smash these Alien scum off our planet. Amazing expansion.

100

Improves on the original with a lot of new features, some balance issues

Legolas_Katarn

09.19.2017

War of the Chosen adds new features to the original game while changing some aspects of its DLC. War of the Chosen adds a variety of new options for their level creation, new mission types, three new soldier types, new enemies, three powerful enemies that can show up in missions, new ways for character to learn skills, the chance of gaining negative traits, a fatigue system, three new factions that you can send soldiers on covert missions with to gain new bonuses, new research options, soldiers can form bonds, more lore for the series by having resistance radio and propaganda announcements, and you can create posters of characters and out of mission victories that can appear in levels. Current mods need to be updated to work with this but the new systems added to game can allow for some more interesting mods to be made.
I enjoyed this more than the base game but there are some issues I found with it. Because of the new fatigue system the game removes the two story based DLC missions (but does keep the new content), you do have the option to keep the DLC in like it was before but this also would set the alien rulers to show up the way they used to which can be difficult when you already have enemies that can show up during missions. The new way to gain skills allows characters to earn individual points and XCOM to earn a group point pool by performing ambush, flank, and high ground kills, these points can be spent in the training facility to allow characters to buy all of their class skills instead of being limited to one or the other, and it allows them to buy additional skills that are randomly assigned to a third tree. This can very easily make characters ridiculously overpowered, both in the mid game, and even more so during the end game, especially after you permanently kill of the new Chosen enemies. Forming bonds between soldiers is a cool idea, but is pretty dull in practice, soldier are assigned random values with every other soldier and it will raise a meter over time when they go on missions or covert actions together, when it fills they can form a level 1, then 2, then 3 bond. This give benefits when near each other and some new abilities to shoot together or give up an action so the other soldier can take another action, very useful but dull that they are all the same regardless of class and they really only say or do anything if the soldier they are bonded with is killed or captured. The new resistance factions can also be given orders, the orders you have access to being randomly assigned as cards with the ability to get more from doing certain covert actions, these can range from being useful at times and helpful all the time to being almost useless or massively overpowered.
Some balance issues aside this is an excellent update to the game and should lead to some interesting mods.

40

Polishing the crap

vargata

09.14.2017

War of the chosen fixes many things and makes the game a bit more playable but it did not fix the most important issues, the totally dumb AI and the laughable, proven rigged random. For those who were on edge in loving and hating the game in the same time, this addon might turns the scale to the love side but those were annoyed by the mechanisms and simplicity of xcom this won't change a damn thing. Especially on higher difficulties it's set to torture you, instead of giving interesting enemy AI to make the game difficult they simply just forcibly kill your soldiers no matter distance or cover or chances but of course not all your soldiers as firaxis want you to keep playing and buying every dlc... watch this with subtitles https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nStfflz5zKQ and you will see the point.